Dr. John Tanton - founder of the modern immigration network.

John H. Tanton, M.D. is a retired ophthalmologist and eye surgeon in Petoskey, Michigan, having practiced medicine from 1964 to 1998.

John Tanton is a strong conservationist and leading advocate for the environment.
In 1975, his essay "Human Migration" won the Mitchell Prize contest and was published as the cover article of The Ecologist.

He founded the Petoskey regional Audubon Society and has been active in a large number of environmental organizations.
Dr. Tanton's recognition that continued human population growth is a significant contributor to environmental problems lead to his involvement with the Sierra Club Population Committee and to becoming President and board member of Zero Population Growth.

"Adage tells us that we often 'don't see the forest for the trees.' Nowhere is this more true than in immigration policy... [we need a] new paradigm for understanding migration phenomena... a new set of ethical principles to guide immigration policy in the twenty-first century.

Conspicuous by its absence from the environmental literature... is the role international migration plays in the demographic and other problems facing mankind.
This omission is perhaps due in part to oversight. So much stress has been laid on the role of reducing births in controlling population growth, that the role of international migration in perpetuating populations growth has largely escaped notice.

Limiting immigration and hence population growth is our duty if we are to pass our national estate on to our successors in livable condition.

World population growth of 10,000 per hour, 250,000 per day, 90-plus million per year, dwarfs the absorptive capacity of the few countries still willing to receive legal (and certainly illegal) immigrants. The stresses caused by population growth cannot be solved by international migration. They must be confronted by and within each individual nation.
Fundamental to the concept of national rights and responsibilities is the duty of each nation to match its population with its political, social, and environmental resources, in both the short and the long term. No nation should exceed what the biologists call its 'carrying capacity.'"